BOOK REVIEW : Paul Watt. Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Music and Morals, the 1871 book by English writer and cleric Hugh Reginald Haweis, attracted a wide readership: it was reprinted at least fifteen times by 1912, and translated into German in 1887. However, for contemporary readers seeking an understanding of the nineteenth-century relationship between music and morality, Haweis’s brief reflections on musical affect, and much longer hagiographies of the lives of great composers, seem to prompt as many questions as they answer. Paul Watt found this to be the case too, and explores the topic much more germanely in Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain.